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For today, let’s focus a little on an introduction and overview of the FFTF. The Fast Flux Test Facility located in Hanford, WA. Here’s the link to the main DOE website landing page. We only recently learned about this gem of a technical asset located in the high desert of Eastern Washington state. FFTF is “a DOE-owned, formerly operating, 400-megawatt (thermal) liquid-metal (sodium)-cooled nuclear research and test reactor located within the FFTF Property Protected Area (PPA), along with numerous support buildings and structures.”
For an ultimate heat sink, this type of plant doesn’t use water for cooling primary systems, but rather direct to air heat exchangers. The black colored stack structures on the left side in the photo above, or the right side of the image below.
This type of sodium cooled fast reactor design is fairly different from traditional light water reactors that are very commonly used through out the world today. As evident in the image below, there is no large used fuel pool filled with hundreds of thousands of gallons of water on the refuel floor.
Next liquid sodium metal is used as a coolant rather than water, this change allows for much higher operating temperatures and lower system pressures, thereby contributing to more efficient heat transfer and reducing the need for extremely robust containment structures in turn bringing down overall construction costs for a facility. A sodium-cooled fast reactor fact sheet can be found here.
Why did research and operations at the FFTF stop? There were many US DOE projects dropped and abandoned in the early 1990s, with a final blow coming when then President Bill Clinton at a 1994 State of the Union address uttered the words, “we’re eliminating programs that are no longer needed, such as nuclear power research and development…” This impact was far reaching and canceled projects such as the IFR (Integral Fast Reactor) concept of Argonne National Laboratory, EBR-II (Experimental Breeder Reactor – II) – at Idaho National Laboratory, and FFTF at Hanford. https://youtu.be/BQ0w0vZiVLE